Exertion Games

Can you jog with a friend who lives in London? Is it possible to play a fair game of table tennis with 3 people? How can you box with people on the other side of the world? Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller has explored “Sports over a Distance” as part of his research on “Exertion Games” – these are games that require physical effort from their players – marrying human-computer interaction, computer games and networking advances. The results are 3 unique exertion games that support novel sports experiences for distributed participants. In this talk, Floyd will present the design and evaluation of these games that led to a new understanding of how to design interactive technology for an active human body. About the Speaker: Originally from Germany, Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, coming from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Prior to that, Floyd was a principal scientist at the Commonwealth and Scientific Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia, leading a research team on the future of “Connecting People”. Floyd’s research past also includes Media Lab Europe (Ireland), Distance Lab (UK), MIT Media Lab (USA), FXPalo Alto Laboratories (USA) and Xerox Parc (USA). Floyd is also a Microsoft Research Asia Fellow and has worked at the Microsoft Beijing lab with the research teams developing Xbox’s Kinect. Floyd’s Exertion Games work has been shortlisted for the European Innovation Games Award (next to Nintendo’s WiiFit), received honorary mentions from the Nokia Ubimedia Award, was commissioned by Wired’s Nextfest. The exertion games were played by over 20,000 players across 3 continents and were featured on the BBC, ABC, Discovery Science Channel and Wired magazine. http://exertioninterfaces.com